The aim of the proposed investigation is to seek to determine and analyze the wide range of human values of which medical ethics is but a part, so as to put the latter into its broad ethical context, apart from which medical ethics cannot be adequately appreciated or assessed. The study is historical, dealing with primitive cultures, the Ancient Near East, Greece, Rome and early Christianity. The methods are those of critical historical research directed not toward producing narrative history but rather a probing and insightful synthesis of values and practice in the ancient world relative to health, disease, suffering and healing. Although historical investigations do not provide ready solutions to current problems, the salubrious effect of increasing our sensitivity to the complexity of issues in modern medical ethics is a reasonable, if not frequent, benefit of historical endeavor. Historical inquiries into medical ethics have tended to focus too sharply on the specific problems, peculiarities and quandaries encountered in the physician/patient and physician/physician relationships. The proposed investigation is an attempt to develop the history of medical ethics within the broader spectrum of values as informed primarily by religious beliefs and secondarily by philosophical schools in antiquity.